Content Curation Tools: 5 Different Approaches
Posted by Romain Goday on Tue, Dec 06, 2011
Why Do You Keep Hearing about Content Curation?
With the unprecedented levels of published information, it is very difficult for Internet users to stay up to date on what matters to them. This situation is especially dramatic for information professionals that must remain aware of new happenings in order to stay ahead of the curve. Content curation is the process of picking the most relevant and valuable content for a specific audience. There is an important human component to content discovery and curation because only users can fully understand the context of the information they are working with. Technology can support content curation by computing large volumes of information on behalf of the user by helping to discover new pieces of Web information.
Types of Content Curation Tools
1. The Expert Approach: Curators
A way to obtain relevant information with a reduced level of effort is to rely on experts. Various platforms provide content targeted to specific industriy segments, markets or topics. The user can subscribe to specific feeds based on the relevance of the topic and the trust the user has of the expert who is curating the topic. Experts can adapt the content and present it in a way that is adapted to its audience. Experts need to allocate a good amount of resources to make sure they don't miss a piece of important information.
- Pros: High understanding of audience needs, adaptability
- Cons: Long process, dependence on specific people
Examples: Scoop.it, Thomson Reuters, Industry Publications
2. The Crowd Approach: Popularity
Most content curation tools use a series of algorithms to determine which content is popular and make it more visible to users. Popularity ranking assumes that the more a Web page is shared, the higher its “quality”. Inbound links, “Likes”, “+1’s” and tweets are some of the indicators used to determine that Internet users found a piece of content valuable. Focus on popularity reduces the noise surrounding an item. The limitation of popularity ranking is that it requires gathering users’ "votes" and therefore delays the discovery process. Popularity can also be manipulated by promotional techniques such as SEO and SMO.
- Pros: Focus on quality
- Cons: Easily manipulated, long process
Examples: Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FlipBoard
3. The User Behavior Approach: Personalization
Content personalization involves using technology to accommodate the different information needs between individuals. It surfaces content that is assumed to be more relevant for a specific user. There are two approaches and they might be combined:
Machine learning: Monitoring the browsing activity of the user to identify which content is more liked. For example, the types of links that are clicked more often and the time spent on specific pages are used to identify which content is more valuable to a specific user. One of the reasons Google built Gmail is to have users logged in when they perform a search and use this data to filter information on their behalf.
Signal sensing: Even when the user is not logged in, a large number of signals are used to segment users in order to filter the information for them. Such signals include location, browser, computer, screen resolution, and others.
Both approaches are based on assumptions. The big challenge is to understand the users' information needs. It requires understanding the user’s context. Technology still struggles to know when the users' needs have changed.
- Pros: Individual experience
- Cons: Slow response to change, based on assumptions
Examples: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Trap.It
4. The Relationships Approach: Social Graph
The social graph is an increasingly used approach to curate information. The user’s connections act as filters by only sharing the information they find useful. This represents an improvement over popularity because users are more likely to trust what their friends are sharing. Some tools, such as Twitter or Facebook, provide ways to create lists that allows users to group particular connections together. The limitation of people-centric curation is that what interests users might not necessarily interest their social graph. There is some overlap but users still get information overload due to the high amount of unrelated information.
- Pros: In real-time, high engagement, trust
- Cons: Noise, dependence on connections
Examples: Facebook, Twitter, TweetDeck
5. The Patterns Approach: Emergence
This approach consists of representing the emergence of content over the Web. The massive growth in the volume of published content allows the identification emerging patterns. This allows users to identify specific aspects of the events that are of higher interest to them. Content curation tools using this method are valuable for users needing to know “what is going on” with topics that are evolving quickly over time. This is the approach we follow at Darwin Ecosystem.
- Pros: In real-time, dynamic, user selection
- Cons: Requires high volume of information
Examples: Darwin Ecosystem, SkyGrid
Final Thoughts
Most of those approaches are combined by content curation tools in an attempt to increase information relevance for the users. Tools cannot effectively understand the context of the user. So the challenge is to reduce the noise without filtering information that could be valuable for the user. Just as a reminder, it would require 413 IBM's BlueGene supercomputers to replicate the operational capabilities of the human brain. So there is no doubt that successful tools need to leverage the human abilities instead of replacing them.
Liked this post?
Subscribe to our blog at the top of the page or follow @Darwineco and @RomainGoday
............................................................................................................................................................
Related articles:
6 Traits of Highly Effective Discovery Engines
5 Reasons Content Discovery Tools Need a Human Touch
Content Curation: Why Detecting Emerging Patterns is Crucial
Search and Discovery: How They Complement Each Other
............................................................................................................................................................
